Zynga interview questions

On the basis of an employee referral, I sent in my resume for the position that focused on Javascript with some HTML/CSS. The initial phone screen was part behavioral and part technical, with some coding done over Collabedit (not as nice as some I've seen). There was real-world binary tree question. Then there was a a 4-part on-site interview. Three were one on one, and one had two people. I was interviewed by the engineering manager for the position, a more senior engineering manager, a senior executive (former engineer), and a panel of a potential colleague and a more senior engineering manager. I had a chance to step out, use the restroom and grab snacks/a drink, but four+ hours is a long time to be stuck in a room proving yourself. Still, it probably wasn't as bad as I had feared. I felt like all of the problems were actually quite reasonable and made sense for working with the particular game. This was not just bizarre algorithms for the sake of being obscure. I felt like I was clueless about a lot of things, but I was able to push on, thinking out loud so they knew where I was trying to go. After it was all said and done it took a little over a week to hear back from them.

I applied to Zynga through linkedin for their Game Services team, and the process moved really fast. I had one on one interview with the Engineering Director at the SF office, who asked basic concepts (how hashmaps works, write code for find if the given strings are anagram or not etc.). I got call next day morning and f2f interviews were scheduled after 3 days. I met the Engineering Manager for the game services team for the first round, and she largely asked about my current project, how would I go about selecting rdbms vs nosql for a project, and writing code to remove duplicates from a linkedlist etc. Second round was design/architecture round with a senior developer, and we spent the entire time discussing how to design a leaderboard. She was looking at the "sorted set" implementation of redis, which I was not aware of beforehand. Third round was with Senior Engineering Director, who had been in the bangalore office for a visit. He asked basic questions about time/space complexity for the given code snippet and asked me to program how to insert a number in a sorted linked list. After that I met the HR manager, who asked about expected CTC, when can I join etc. and usual HR questionnaire, and told me that they would get back to me in next 2-3 days with their response. I got a rejection mail about a week later.